Fewer than 200 people were murdered in Memphis last year. That sentence hasn’t been true since 2019.
The city recorded roughly a 28% decline in violent crime across 2024 compared to the prior year. Homicides fell below 200. Aggravated assaults dropped by double digits. Robberies declined for the second consecutive year. The numbers, taken together, represent the most significant single-year improvement Memphis has posted in recent memory.
For the security industry, these numbers create a question worth asking: does less crime mean less business? The short answer is no. The longer answer reveals something interesting about how private security has become embedded in Memphis’s commercial infrastructure.
Where the Numbers Moved
Homicides drew the most attention, dropping below 200 for the first time in five years. Memphis had crossed the 300 mark in 2021 and stayed above 250 through 2022. The downward trajectory that started in late 2023 accelerated through 2024.
Aggravated assaults, which make up the largest share of violent crime by volume, fell by roughly 25%. This category includes everything from domestic violence incidents involving weapons to parking lot confrontations that escalate. The decline was spread across the city, though some precincts saw sharper drops than others.
Robbery numbers came down too. Carjackings, which had become a defining crime for Memphis in national media coverage, decreased noticeably in 2024. MPD’s targeted operations against carjacking rings, combined with federal prosecution of repeat offenders, appeared to have an effect. The South Memphis and Whitehaven precincts recorded some of the largest percentage declines.
Property crime followed a parallel track. Auto theft remained stubbornly high through the first half of 2024, then began declining in the third and fourth quarters. Commercial burglaries dropped citywide.
What’s Driving the Decline
Pinpointing a single cause for crime trends is a fool’s errand. Criminologists who study these patterns will tell you that multiple factors usually contribute, and separating their individual effects is nearly impossible in real time.
That said, several things changed in Memphis during 2024.
MPD’s staffing situation remained difficult, yet the officers on the street adopted tactics that prioritized high-crime corridors and repeat offender identification. The Real Time Crime Center, which uses a network of surveillance cameras and license plate readers across the city, gave detectives faster access to evidence. More cases moved to federal court, where conviction rates are higher and sentences are longer.
The consent decree between MPD and the Department of Justice continued through 2024. Critics of the decree argue it ties officers’ hands and slows response times. Supporters point to the declining crime numbers as evidence that reformed policing can be effective policing. The truth probably sits somewhere between those positions. What’s clear is that the reforms haven’t prevented crime from falling.
Demographic shifts played a role that rarely gets discussed. Memphis lost population between 2020 and 2024. Some of the neighborhoods that saw the sharpest crime reductions also experienced significant population loss. Fewer people in an area tends to produce fewer crimes in that area. This isn’t a victory; it’s an arithmetic reality.
Economic conditions mattered too. Unemployment in the Memphis metro area held below 5% through most of 2024. Distribution and logistics jobs at the FedEx hub and surrounding warehouses provided steady employment for the demographics most statistically associated with crime involvement. A person working third shift at a warehouse is a person not on the street at 2 a.m.
Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga
Memphis wasn’t alone in seeing improvements. Crime declined across all four of Tennessee’s major metros in 2024, continuing a trend that began unevenly in 2023.
Nashville recorded drops in both violent and property crime, with homicides falling below 100 for the first time since 2020. Metro Nashville PD credited targeted enforcement in the Antioch and North Nashville areas, along with expanded community violence intervention programs.
Knoxville saw a modest decline in violent crime, roughly 12% year over year. The city’s numbers were never as dramatic as Memphis’s in either direction. Knoxville’s violent crime rate per capita remained below the state average throughout the year.
Chattanooga’s story is more complicated. Violent crime dropped overall, with certain categories like aggravated assault declining meaningfully. Gun violence remained a persistent challenge in specific neighborhoods along the MLK Boulevard corridor. Chattanooga PD expanded its use of ShotSpotter acoustic detection technology in 2024, which improved response times to gunfire even when no 911 calls were placed.
The statewide pattern suggests that whatever is driving the decline isn’t unique to any single city’s policing strategy. National trends show similar patterns in cities across the South and Midwest. Something broader is happening, whether it’s demographic shifts, economic stabilization, the aging-out of a cohort of offenders from the early 2020s crime spike, or some combination nobody has fully mapped yet.
What It Means for Private Security
Here’s where the story gets counterintuitive. Crime falls 28%, and the security industry’s phone keeps ringing.
Commercial property managers in Memphis added security guards, patrol services, and camera systems during the high-crime years of 2021 and 2022. They signed contracts. They budgeted for them. Their tenants came to expect a guard at the front desk and a patrol car in the parking lot. Removing that security now, even with crime declining, creates a perception problem that most property managers don’t want to deal with.
Tenant leases in Class A and B office buildings in East Memphis and the Downtown corridor frequently include security provisions. Those provisions don’t expire because crime statistics improve. The guard stays because the lease says the guard stays.
Insurance is another lock-in mechanism. Several major commercial insurance carriers in Tennessee began offering premium discounts for properties with documented security programs in 2023 and 2024. A property manager who drops their security contract loses the discount, which in many cases exceeds the cost of the contract itself. The economics of keeping security in place are better than the economics of removing it.
Retail operations have reached similar conclusions. Organized retail theft, while difficult to measure precisely, remained a major concern for chains operating in the Memphis market. Stores that added loss prevention officers in 2023 kept them through 2024 regardless of whether overall crime trended down. The theft they’re preventing is targeted and persistent; it doesn’t follow the same patterns as street crime.
Some security companies actually reported increased demand in late 2024. The explanation is straightforward: when crime is extremely high, some businesses can’t afford security. When crime drops and the economy stabilizes, those same businesses finally have the budget to invest in protection they wanted all along.
The Perception Gap
There’s a disconnect between what the numbers show and what Memphis residents feel. A 28% decline in violent crime is enormous by any statistical measure. Yet surveys of Memphis residents consistently show that perceptions of safety lag behind actual improvements by two to three years.
This gap drives private security demand as much as the crime numbers themselves. A business owner in Cordova reads about a carjacking on the evening news and calls a security company the next morning. It doesn’t matter that carjackings are down 30% from their peak. The fear is present tense.
Memphis’s reputation nationally also factors in. The city spent years on lists of “most dangerous cities in America.” Those rankings generated real economic consequences: companies that chose not to locate here, conventions that picked Nashville instead, young professionals who applied for jobs elsewhere. The security industry exists partly to counteract that reputation for the businesses that stayed.
Reading the Trend Line
Crime declined in 2024. That’s good. Whether it continues declining in 2025 depends on factors that are difficult to predict: federal funding decisions, the consent decree’s evolution, MPD’s ability to recruit and retain officers, economic conditions in the logistics sector, and dozens of smaller variables that interact in ways nobody fully understands.
What won’t change is the structural demand for private security in Tennessee. The gap between what public law enforcement can cover and what businesses need covered isn’t closing anytime soon. Memphis PD could hire 500 officers tomorrow, and commercial property owners would still want their own guards, their own cameras, their own patrol vehicles circling the lot.
The 28% decline is real and it matters. It also doesn’t change the fundamental equation that’s driven private security growth in this state for the past five years. Businesses that hire guards do it for their own reasons, on their own timelines, based on their own risk calculations. Crime statistics are an input to that decision. They’re rarely the deciding factor.